Dir: Wes Anderson

Starring: Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman

Earlier this year I was forced to make a difficult decision. The 20^th of May saw the airing of the 400^th episode of The Simpsons, a show that, up until 1998, had represented the zenith of TV comedy and had exercised as much a formative effect over me as my parents. With this landmark, one fact became painfully obvious: over half of The Simpsons is bad.

I still consider myself a Simpsons fan for much the same reason that I am still a Wes Anderson fan. Not because I feel there is any chance of the series getting back on track – that shark has been well and truly jumped – but because I have enough good times in the bank. After the inspirational Rushmore and the beautifully-rendered The Royal Tenenbaums – both of which masterfully build on the promise of Bottle Rocket – came the sub-par Life Aquatic, and now another unforgivable bout of navel-gazing in the form of The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson is teetering on a similar precipice to Matt Groening – one more dud and half of his output will have been stinkers.

The Darjeeling Limited follows the self-indulgent exploits of three brothers, intent on finding themselves a year after their father’s death, and showcases a director desperate to rediscover what it was that once made him so good at what he does. Both Anderson and his characters singularly fail in their attempts to recapture the past: the boys cannot reanimate their father’s car in time for his funeral, just as Anderson cannot breathe fresh life into the staples of a genre he has so firmly ensconced himself within. The director’s tics are here for all to see, but the slow-motion musical interludes and dispassionate dialogue seem almost hackneyed, a shadow of their former selves from earlier works. It is an over-reliance on these devices that leaves the film with an overall Anderson-by-numbers feel: one particular scene, in which Owen Wilson finally removes his facial bandages, is painfully reminiscent of Richie Tenenbaum’s suicide attempt – a much happier time for the viewer and director alike. 

 Further unwelcome parallels can be drawn between Anderson and his characters when we consider the Whitman boys’ casual fascination with their Indian surroundings. Anderson attempts to present the fact that the boys include indigenous religious ceremonies on their laminated itineraries of self-discovery as humorous, but again the director is guilty of the very same cultural cherry-picking. It is through an association with such grandeur and tradition that Anderson hopes to lend his film some much needed exoticism, but it is when his characters are thrust into their host country’s bosom that the film loses any focus it may have had; indeed the film is derailed so spectacularly by the boys’ expulsion from the titular train that one almost suspects it is deliberate, a cautionary note to fellow film-makers – This is what happens if you go off the tracks. 

All this of course could be excused if the film were entertaining. The humour however is so slight as to pass almost totally under the radar, the pace is irritatingly pedestrian, and the conclusion is thoroughly unsatisfying. Oh so the literal baggage was meant to represent the characters’ emotional baggage – I guess it must have been a metaphor all along. Mollycoddling an audience in such a way is not a right earned by a film as insubstantial as this one. With two strikes down, Mr. Anderson truly is teetering on that precipice. One more like this and I’ll be only to happy to give him out.

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